AFTER more than 70 years of being an abaca farmer, 92-year-old Lino Malasaga finally became the owner of the land he is tilling.

This was after the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) recently awarded to Malasaga his certificate of land ownership award (CLOA).

Malasaga, who lives in Barangay Hantag, an upland village in a city in Eastern Visayas, still cannot believe that the land he had been tilling for decades is now his own.

“Our dream of having a land we can call our own has been fulfilled,” Malasaga said. Malasaga said that for farmers like him land means life.

“This, to us, is our life, which will help us secure the future of our children,” he added.

Malasaga was one of the nine agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) from Maasin City who received individual CLOAs from DAR Eastern Visayas Regional Director Robert Anthony Yu at the Leyte Progressive High School in Tacloban City.

Municipal Agrarian Reform Program Officer Vissa Arnela Villa disclosed that Malasaga was awarded 1.2 hectares of land, which is part of the 6.4-hectare abaca farm situated in the adjacent village of Malapoc Sur, which was once covered by a collective CLOA.

When Villa visited Malasaga last week to facilitate the issuance of tax declarations to ARBs as new owners of lands awarded under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), Malasaga said that during the long years that passed, he did not expect that the day would come when he would be able to hold the land title that he had longed for.

He thanked President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Agrarian Reform Secretary Conrado Estrella III for the free land title, which, according to him, “We did not spend a single centavo.”

He also expressed his gratitude to Villa and her staff for the help they had extended to them. With his memory still sharp, Malasaga shared, “I started working on that land when I was only 12 years old.”

Now a widower, Malasaga is advised by his children to rest from his farming activities and just entrust everything to them.

Malasaga was the oldest recipient in Eastern Visayas of individual land titles handed by the DAR during the simultaneous distribution of CLOAs nationwide on July 7 this year. The CLOA distribution coincided with the signing into law of Republic Act 11953 or the New Agrarian Emancipation Act.

The Republic Act 11953 freed ARBs from debts incurred from the amortization of lands awarded under Presidential Decree 27 and Republic Acts 6657 and 9700.